Stanley Hauerwas describes a sermon as an argument. Eugene Lowry describes a sermon in terms of a plot, with it having a setting, a central conflict, and a resolution. Can a sermon be both argument and story? Or more generally, what exactly do you think a sermon is? What are you expecting to hear when you are confronted with one?
I ask this because at the end of the summer I am due to deliver my first sermon in my home church. Right now I am reading the lectionary passages for that week and letting them breathe in my mind and imagination, with the hopes that something (although Lowry would rather speak of a sermon as an event than a thing) will reveal itself as requiring urgent utterance. I'm excited and terrified by the task of preaching, but more than anything I am absolutely convinced that the theological training I have done has a sermon as one of its ends.
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